Use Incentives For Recycling

December 18, 2007

This is America; people respond to fiscal incentives. Therein may be the answer to improving the state's stagnant rate of waste recycling.

A year ago, the state Department of Environmental Protection adopted a new solid-waste management plan that called for a dramatic increase in recycling. The state's recycling rate has for years been an anemic 25 to 30 percent. The new plan calls for increasing the rate to 58 percent.

Since March, an advisory committee has been developing strategies to reach this ambitious goal. As part of a broad approach that involves such things as recycling organic materials and disposing of construction and demolition materials, the committee is looking at fiscal incentives for household recycling.

The kind of plan members are considering is called "pay as you throw." In this kind of program, residents are typically given bags or containers of a certain size and charged for each one that is filled with trash. They are also given recycle bins, and the disposition of recyclables is free. Thus the more materials that are recycled, the less the household spends on trash pickup.

Pay-as-you-throw is used in about a dozen communities in the state, and more extensively in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and some other states. One study indicates it increases recycling by 42 percent. In Massachusetts, residents of towns using the system generate 512 pounds of trash a year, while residents of towns that don't use it average 902 pounds a year, according to a presentation made to the advisory committee this past fall by consultant and committee member Kristen Brown. The Connecticut average is 965 pounds of garbage a year.

The idea that fiscal incentives will aid recycling is catching on. An entirely different approach, called RecycleBank and begun in Philadelphia in 2004, pays households in discount coupons for stores such as IKEA and Dick's Sporting Goods or products such as Coca-Cola for the amount of materials they recycle. The program is operating in 27 communities in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, and its founders announced in October they were going national.

RecycleBank has reported very promising results, though DEP officials caution that its long-term viability is still unknown. Company spokesman Jonathan Klein said there could be a pilot program in Hartford next year.

However accomplished, state and local officials need to push forward on financial incentives to recycle. We know they work. Connecticut's bottle bill has taken millions of cans and bottles out of the waste stream for a nickel apiece. If water bottles were included, as they should be, millions more plastic bottles would be recycled. A pay-as-you-throw system may be a hard sell in towns that cover trash pickup in local taxes, but local officials should try, because it makes sense.

The reasons to recycle should by now be obvious. The practice cuts back on energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, saves money, helps the economy, keeps the environment cleaner and lessens the need for landfill space.

We Americans lived profligately for a long time, wasting land, fuel and other resources because we could. Now we can't. The throw-away society has got to become the reduce, reuse and recycle society. Education is important. We need to shop for products that don't use excess packaging or can be deconstructed for recycling.

DEP Commissioner Gina McCarthy and her staff are to be commended for aggressively and ambitiously pushing to double the state's rate of recycling. The way to support them is to recycle.